Mamma Mia!

Mamma Mia!

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd (PG)

On her wedding day, a woman tries to figure out who her father is.

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Be wary of movies in which the actors are having more fun than the audience, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and the rest of Mamma Mia!’s starry cast shamelessly flounce their way through one ABBA hit after another in this adaptation of the popular stage musical. But the fun only lasts about 10 minutes, said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. Very quickly the “aggressive you-go-girl joyfulness” of this story—about Amanda Seyfried as a bride-to-be who invites her mother’s old flames to her wedding to uncover her true father’s identity—sours into “outright oppression.” Moviegoers get clobbered with dated dialogue, cheeky jokes, and big dance numbers. Handing over the film to the director of the Broadway production, Phyllida Lloyd, was a bad idea. She’s never directed a film before, and it shows. How much of Mamma Mia! you can stand “depends on how much you like ABBA,” said Richard Corliss in Time. The film is “prime nostalgia” for viewers of a certain age. For anyone else, it’s “faux-stalgia”—which can be almost as much fun, as long as you don’t expect too much.